TEXAS LETTER

Enclosed find renewal for one year.Your historical articles interest one born in Macon County.Perhaps you can find room for similar notes
about other old timers.

My
uncle, Dr. Wiley Howell Freeman, died at Sentinel, Okla., on March 6th.His wife, Laura Seagraves Freeman, passed
away on February 1st, after a fall while waiting on her invalid husband.Uncle was born on White Oak in 1855.His father, Abe, lived on the “Katie Hill”
across the branch from the old County Farm or “poor house” place.His grandfather, Jimmy, lived earlier on
this county farm site.The oldest
remembered of the Freeman tribe was “Coon” Freeman, left behind in Washington
County, Va., when others came by ox wagons through Cumberland Gap into
Tennessee about 1800 or shortly after.Abe Freeman was a deacon in Antioch Baptist church and a very pious
man.Passersby reported hearing his
loud praying alone in the chestnut orchard about daylight as they went to mill
by his place.

Wiley Howell Freeman went to school to Billy Smith and Avery
Harlan.He passed oral examination
under Harlan and taught school at Antioch and near Franklin, Ky., before going
to Vanderbilt where he and his brother-in-law graduated in medicine before
coming to Roanoke, Tex., in 1882.Pioneer preachers of the “Christians” or “Reformers” (by reproach,
“Campbellites”) in those days were Isaac T. Reneau, Henry Lovelady, and Eph. H.
Rogers.Over in Monroe County, Ky.,
John Mulky started the reformation idea of “no religious authority but the
Bible,” near Tompkinsville before the Campbells left the Presbyterians.Mulky’s brother was also a preaching elder,
moved to Commerce, Texas, where the writer in the 1920’s spoke at his funeral
and that of his wife, both close to ninety years old, and also that of his son,
Judge Oliver Mulky.Oliver’s father was
a soldier in the Civil War (Words omitted here in the original.) by horse from
Glasgow to Scottsville, where they routed the foe from the courthouse by
setting fire to straw they had for bedding there.

It
was the prevailing hyper-Calvinism that drove most of the “reformers” from the
“orthodox” Presbyterian, Primitive Baptist, and Episcopalian groups.The Cumberland Presbyterians illustrate a
similar move as the Missionaries to adjust to freedom on the American frontier
to escape state and creedal forms of religion that had prevailed in Europe, but
the “reformers” left all creeds in an effortto take the Bible alone and make each congregation independent.Wiley and Hise Freeman brought Rogers and A.
Alsup to Cook County, Texas, to preach about 1885.They arrived with long-tailed coats, stiff hats, and saddle bags
to ride through Texas black mud on the running gear of a wagon pulled by four
mules.

Sam
Seagraves and Wiley Howell Freeman practiced medicine over sixty years, “Uncle
Wiley” went to the Plains of west Texas in 1900, selling land for forty that
cost him ten and investing in land at a dollar up.He later moved to Sentinel, Okla., having been joined by families
of his two brothers, Abe and Joe, in 1900.In one year, as he wrote Macon County Times, a few years ago, he
harvested 40,000 bushels of wheat on his farm in west Texas.He was always active in his profession, as a
citizen, and in religious activities.He served two terms in Texas State Legislature where ha helped get
support in 1896 for the one teacher’s college then in the state.So he made a small fortune in the growing
West, although as a boy he had lived in poverty when at the end of the year a
large part of the family earnings went to pay security debts his kind father
had signed for indigent neighbors.

Among the writer’s other ancestors were the Brays who came over from
Kentucky.Grandfather Richard P. “Dick”
Bray operated a store on the corner of the Square across from the Faust Hotel
in 1890.He then went back down on
White Oak where a store and post office, called “Eason,” from Eason Howell,
brother of Dr. Wiley Howell at Lafayette, were run until they moved to Galen by
Johnny Hohanan, who bought out E. G. Cook.

The
Drivers came from Virginia shortly after the Revolutionary War.Dinwiddie Driver was named for the Governor
of Virginia under England.Grants of
land were to his generation.His
brother, Alvin Driver, settled down farther on the creek and was father of my
grandmother, Delilah, who lived on the place after she married Dick Bray.“Diddy” Driver had a son named Alvin, his
wife bring Aunt Jennie, a Tucker.“Little Alvin” was a brother of John A., Delilah, and Mrs. Anderson Bray
(Susan).His wife was katie Howard, and
children, Hettie, Mae, and Bert, living at Galen.Joey Driver, veteran of the Civil War, Lived above the Hutson
(Brooks) corn mill and was a distant relative.Just after the war a straggler on horse rode up to the place, then
occupied by John Gillenwater, who was away at the time.The man demanded entrance, but the wife and
child, along with my father (A. E. Freeman, then a child); ran from room to
room.He led his horse onto the porch
and partly into the kitchen.He carried
a gun.When they ran across to old Abe
Freeman place, rode around the field and up to that house.Grandmother called her husband from the
field to help.It was this man or
another of similar circumstances that barely escaped with his life, for Wiley H.
(“Bugler”) stood in a little shack near by with the old gun loaded and sighted
on him in case he tried to use violence.He rode off never to be heard of except that he laid down fences and
took a rather direct route toward Kentucky.

About thirty-odd Federal soldiers for years got their pensions through
the post office at Eason where our family had a store.But more about such old timers at a later
date perhaps.